Text - Rhodes University

the first generation whose world is more strongly influenced by commercial media than
fine art or literature. Their cultural milieu is more visual than verbal- radio, newspapers,
books and magazines are substantially different in texture from television, computers and
videos or films. (Novels do not break for advertisements, nor does radio have trailers.)
So inevitably comic artists are faced with a problem of language. "Burning with an
inferiority complex towards the 'high' culture in whose discourse they are themselves
fluent, their overwheening concern is to validate pop culture." (Reynolds, 1990, p.lO)
Working in a medium understood by their peers, they are then confronted with the
problem of integrating a fine art training and understanding into the preset rules of a
commercial medium. A new language, or perhaps just a dialect, must evolve.
The more obviously poetic, less narrative stories were rejected by peers as being
incomprehensible, contrived and 'arty'. To an uncertain artist or writer, contrived
obscurity can seem to enhance the importance and profundity of their work.
What Bitterkomix understood from the beginning is the fine balance that must be
maintained; comics are not a new medium, they have a solid history of development, and
only with a thorough understanding of this can diversions then be introduced. To
blatantly work within the comic medium is to accept comic conventions; rejection, if
necessary, follows after that. Differences from standard comics are as important and
telling and useful as any other aspect, especially as comic audiences are alert to any such
deviations.
156